Catholic spectacle and Rome's Jews. Early modern conversion and resistance. By Emily Michelson. Pp. xvi + 333 incl. 11 ills. Princeton–Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2022. £30. 978 0 691 21133 6

ical and religious changes. The fourth chapter examines the activities of the Angelics, the Barnabites, the Somascans and the Ursulines within the thorny context of Italian reformism, and how, in some cases, they sought to converge on the ideas proposed by the most prominent figures within the circles of Evangelism and Spiritualism. The fifth chapter examines how, in the second half of the sixteenth century, the reforming orders underwent a series of seminal changes which would alter their physiognomy. At the same time the chapter explores how the ideas of Battista da Crema, and in part those of Merici and Miani, managed to survive in the years following the Council of Trent. Mazzonis’s book offers a vivid and well-researched investigation of the intellectual and religious ferment which characterised the reforming orders of the Italian Peninsula during a period which was polarised by the spread of Lutheranism and the orthodoxy of the Catholic Reformation. By focusing on the key – but hard to decode – concepts of devotion, salvation and spiritualism, the author sheds lights on the inner mechanisms which regulated the life of the reforming orders and how their agenda was much freer and more inclusive than that elaborated by the traditional Tridentine orders like the Jesuits or the Oratorians. Overall, Mazzonis’s book is a welcome and much awaited analysis. It will finally explain to both established and young scholars how the concept and practice of reforms of Christian life in the sixteenth-century Italian peninsula was more extremely articulated and fluid than the traditional historiography on the Catholic Reformation had previously taught.